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The Business Rules claims to provide readers with the “seven irrefutable laws that determine all business success”. Rather a bold claim, but the author backs it up with over 20 years of research.

Eichenbaum starts off by stressing that there is no single formula that can guarantee business success—however, every successful business has been successful due to its mastery of the seven laws, and every failed business can attribute its failure to either ignoring or being ignorant of at least one of the laws. To be clear, a business can be successful without mastering all seven laws, but there will always be scope for another business in the same sector to be even more successful – for example, Microsoft versus Apple or Southwest versus the larger airlines.

The laws are:

1. Sell it for more than it costs you.
2. In order to succeed it is imperative to know exactly what business you are in.
3. It’s not about the product, programs or even the people. It is, however, always about the process.
4. Better, faster, and cheaper are really lovely, but easier is everything.
5. Your employees possess everything necessary for you to achieve virtually every objective. Every single one of them has far more to offer than you presently capture.
6. It’s not business. It’s personal.
7. Treat each of your employees with the same care, respect, courtesy, and deference that you treat each of your customers.

To illustrate the laws, Eichenbaum uses many examples and anecdotes from throughout business history, showing that the rules are truly applicable across all industries. This makes the book easy to read, since it’s essentially just a collection of anecdotes that help the laws stick with you. That said, I think the overall structure of the book could have been improved to mirror the laws themselves. Although there is one chapter per law, the chapters aren’t named after the laws. That’s a minor quibble with an otherwise enjoyable and readable book, though.

You should read this book if:

• You like collecting business stories
• You are looking to learn from the mistakes of others
• You are in the planning process for a new business

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One of my favourite novels is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. At one point in the book, the main character (Yossarian) is explaining his reasoning to his superior officer. When he finishes, the officer asks what the world would be like if everyone thought that way. Yossarian replies, “Well, I’d be a fool to think any other way then, wouldn’t I?”

I thought of that line when I started reading Be Unreasonable, where author Paul Lemberg defines being reasonable as using “the same strategies everyone else uses.” Examples of these strategies being things like setting your goals only slightly higher than last year and being conservative in setting deadlines in order that you can reach them in time.

Lemberg suggests that strategies such as these won’t make you stand out from the crowd, and instead you need to turn that thinking on its head – be unreasonable – in order to get ahead (whatever that means for you). Examples of unreasonable strategies are “saying yes to yourself every time someone says no to your idea” and “doing more than you are asked for”. However, I should point out that Lemberg isn’t advocating being reckless—indeed, he’s quite clear that you should take full responsibility for everything you do, and be accountable to those you work with.

The book is split into six chapters, the first of which is the “Unreasonable Manifesto”. The second chapter provides more insight into why you might want to be unreasonable, and the subsequent chapters cover strategy, thinking, tactics and execution. The book is structured well, and it’s a very easy read. I found it reminiscent of some of Seth Godin’s work such as Free Prize Inside. Where Godin talks about being remarkable, Lemberg talks about being unreasonable. The end result is essentially the same: you’ll stand out from the crowd due to your effectiveness. If you’ve already read Free Prize Inside, then you may not get anything new from Being Unreasonable. However, I found it to be different enough to be a worthwhile read on its own, so I definitely recommend it.

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Competing on Analytics could be seen as the more serious partner book to the recently reviewed Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense. As with other books from Harvard Business School Press, such as Blue Ocean Strategy, this book is split in two parts. The first portion deals with the what and why of analytical competition, whilst the second half is focussed on helping you build an organisation that competes with analytics.

By analytics, the authors mean “the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions”. This information can then either be acted on by humans, or can be used by a fully automated system. This then helps you to make the most efficient and effective decisions possible.

There are four key pillars to succeed in being a “full-bore” analytical competitor: analytics supports a strategic, distinctive capability; enterprise-wide management of analytics – it’s not just constrained to one department; commitment of senior management to analytics; and the company has made a significant strategic bet on competing with analytics – in other words, the whole existence of the organisation is centred around analytics. Examples of distinctive capabilities include Netflix ability to predict customer movie preferences and Wal-Mart’s focus on supply chains. Interestingly, professional sports (at least in North America) seems to be the “industry” that this method of competing is most prevalent. Here, of course, teams focus on selecting the right players for the teams.

The case for analytical competition is eloquently made, and very well thought out. Best of all (for me, at least!) are all the stories about how companies are succeeding with this strategy. This provides more of a framework for designing your organisation around analytics, and as a result if you’re at all serious about using analytics, I suggest you read this as soon as you can. Even if you’re only interested in analytics, you should at least read the first part of the book!

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Open Business Models by Henry Chesbrough deals with how companies can make money in a new era of “open innovation” (the name of Chesbrough’s previous book, as it happens)—the process of devising new ideas in collaboration with other businesses or individuals to enhance existing products or invent completely new ones. There are two main ways that companies will do this: “outside in” or “inside out”.

Companies that take in ideas from the outside generate value by bringing ideas to a wider audience than they may otherwise have found. Procter & Gamble is a good example of a company that does this, where several products, such as Swiffer have either been licensed in or acquired outright. Following the success of the initial few products via this scheme, Procter & Gamble evidently now has a large number of people actively scouting for technologies and products that it can put it’s resources behind.

The other way a company can generate value is by allowing others to utilise their unused ideas. IBM is an excellent example of this, where not only do they license unused patents, but also (after some internal struggle) now license their technologies too. This helps those who license the patents because now they can also gain insight as to how those patents are applied.

The first half of the book is largely the theory behind Chesbrough’s ideas, and the second half is more practical, along with an excellent case study of IBM struggle to reinvent itself during the 1990s. Although the ideas are definitely geared towards large-scale companies who can afford to invest in research and not do anything with the end results, I enjoyed the book and the stories of how these companies are putting ideas to work: both their own, and those of others. But then, I’m a bit of a geek like that.

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Imagine a manufacturing company where the workers set their own production targets, clock-in when they want, and are given a vote as to where the factory should be located. By conventional wisdom, this is a recipe for disaster. Surely workers will set absurdly low targets and only turn up when they feel like it? Imagine a company where management set their own salary and benefits package. Surely they’ll award themselves astronomical sums of money? According to Ricardo Semler, the boss of Semco, conventional wisdom is wrong, and in Maverick he sets out to detail exactly why.

Semler took over the Brazilian manufacturer Semco from his father, and in the subsequent years set about dismantling the traditional pyramid scheme that was in place, along with everything else associated a traditional company. At the time the revised edition was published (1999), Semco was one of South America’s fastest-growing businesses and had been named as the best company to work for in Brazil. Thanks to the unorthodox working practices instituted by Semler, sales had grown to $160 million from $35 million in 1993 (when the book was originally published).

Many of the ideas in this book have now begun to become more mainstream, such as slightly more flexible working hours and “hot-desking”, but there are more that still haven’t come through, such as the fact that Semco’s books are open to reading by every employee (the company is still private) and the fact that employees set their own targets and wages. Semler argues that allowing employees to set their own targets works because people are, in the main, honest, and they don’t want to let their colleagues down, or be seen to be greedy. Having such an openly democratic company could be seen as massively risky, but Semler seems to set the tone perfectly, allowing people to flourish within the business. You could also argue that having a closely controlled company is also risky, because people will always feel as though something is being hidden from them, leading to suspicion and distrust. I know what kind of company I’d rather work for.

This is a provocative book on company design, and I think this quote sums up Semler’s ideas perfectly:

We’ve all learned how to answer email on a Sunday, but none of us has learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon.

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Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense is subtitled “Profiting from evidence-based management”, and the book is focussed on providing as many examples and case studies in this area as it can—all aimed to convince you that you should manage your business by the actual information you have to hand and not from what looks to be working at your competitors or other companies.

Authors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton write in the preface that this form of management has already taken hold in medicine: the concept that “solid research” should be behind the decisions made by physicians. So why isn’t the basis for decision making in business? A key factor is due to the fact that the whole organisation must be committed to data to drive decisions and completely changing a corporate culture can be difficult. This is particularly true when conventional wisdom and “this is what worked in the past” thinking generally permeates business.

For example, why not just copy what your competitors are doing work? The answer given by Pfeffer and Sutton is that there is one aspect of a company that is impossible to duplicate: its employees. The example given is in the airline industry, where many companies have attempted to emulate Southwest’s tactics but have been singularly unable to emulate Southwest’s success.

The last chapter in the book provides nine tips on how best to integrate this management style in your company, encouraging you to take the time to reflect on your industry and business. Of course, one of the pre-requisites for being able to run your company on data is the ability to actually collect data about your business. Given the number of companies that rely on computers now, however, there should be plenty of opportunity to generate appropriate information for a majority of businesses. This book is an excellent introduction to the science of business, and I recommend it to you if you’re interested in moving one step ahead of your competitors.

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“Daunting.” That was the first word that sprang to mind when I picked Jared Diamond’s book up. At 480 information-packed pages and subtitled “A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years”, I think it’s fair to say that you need to be in just the right frame of mind to start reading this. Once you do start though, you’ll find it hard to stop.

The book starts by posing a simple question: why is it that Europeans have dominated the world for the last 500 years? A simple question perhaps, but not one that comes with a simple answer. For example, why was it that the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, rather than the other way around?

Diamond, as a professor of physiology, dismisses theories of genetic superiority out of hand, and instead provides a scientific examination of the evidence. He presents a thorough and logical explanation of how the land-mass of Eurasia, being wider, lent itself to farming and cultural interchange more than Africa or the Americas did. Combined with more varied flora and fauna, this allowed people to domesticate crops and animals earlier than on the other continents, which in turn led to increased populations, which led to specialisation and government, all of which leads to more rapid technological innovation. In all of this, the Eurasians also developed an increased resistance to diseases carried by the domesticated animals, and it was this that almost certainly carried the greatest threat to the Aztecs.

The book also touches on a wide variety of other topics, and I thoroughly recommend it—it’s objective, fascinating and enlightening.

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Team Rodent (1998) by Carl Hiaasen, is more of a pamphlet than a book, being only about 80 pages long. Subtitled “How Disney Devours the World”, it sets out to demonstrate why everything Disney is bad for you.

I’ll admit in advance that I’m a Disney fan, and that may cloud my judgement somewhat. That said, Hiaasen is from Florida, which no doubt alters his perspective. However, I’m well aware that Disney isn’t perfect, and I’m always interested in hearing opposing points of view to my own.

Hiaasen begins his essay by taking great glee in the fact that there are hardcore sex shops just a couple of blocks from the New Amsterdam Theater in Times Square, New York, which Disney had just renovated to host The Lion King musical. Due to this work, Times Square had been cleaned up and become a destination for locals and tourists again. This seems to be the author’s way of pointing out that Disney is a powerful presence wherever it goes, and particularly Orlando, where it is the largest private employer. I realise that capitalism isn’t a perfect system, but it’s the best we have—and I don’t think that this in itself makes Disney more “evil” than any other large corporation.

Most of the examples in the book follow a similar pattern—Hiaasen points out an “evil” aspect of Disney, then states that actually, they’re not all that bad after all. Another example of deals with governments to improve infrastructure around planned theme parks certainly aren’t unique to Disney.

A couple of cases do make for uncomfortable reading, such as the security force at Walt Disney World essentially behaving as though they were real police officers. In one incident, a youth was killed following a high-speed car chase, and the company refused to reveal their records of what was recorded on the radio system and so on. That kind of event is definitely unpleasant, but I fail to see how that or anything else in the treatise demonstrates how Disney is devouring the world.

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This is the new book by Price Pritchett, whom I hadn’t come across before. Pritchett runs a consultancy which works with large companies on the innovation and leadership fronts.

Hard Optimism is a pretty short book, about 120 pages, and details 12 principles of maintaining an optimistic mindset. The theory behind this is that those with an optimistic mindset live longer and achieve more compared with their pessimistic counterparts. So far, so familiar.

However, Pritchett contends that rather than optimism and pessimism being a single scale with polar opposites, there are actually two scales, one for optimism and one for pessimism. At any given moment, we can measure how optimistic and how pessimistic we are. This makes sense to me on the basis that I can consider the same thing and see how things would turn out if everything goes well, but also how things might turn out if everything goes wrong.

Pritchett also covers an area that I found particularly interesting: that of hope.

Most of us make the mistake of counting on hope to “just happen”. We don’t consider it a mental discipline that can be practiced. The schools didn’t teach us that this is a skill we should develop.

Pritchett points to a few pieces of research that indicate how hope can play a role in success, such as a study of college students where their level of hope proved to be a more accurate predictor of college grades than SAT scores. Not perfect perhaps, but still interesting to me. He goes on to state that hope is “an act of mental focus”, and that by developing it through repeated practice our attention is drawn to the positive aspects of your life. The implication of this being that you will take advantage of this positivity to build upon your successes. Now, that doesn’t sound all that different from the other theories of positivity, but hope is a slightly different way of framing it and one which I think might be worth experimenting with.

If you’re in the market for such a book, I’d recommend this one. At the very least, it does a very good job of summarising the research done by people like Martin Seligman and Mihaly Cikszentmihalyi.

Tags: bookreview, books, personaldevelopment

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Andy Sernovitz is the Chief Executive of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and Word of Mouth Marketing is an excellent introduction to the subject. The book is fairly short, at just over 200 pages, but it doesn’t feel like anything is missing from the book. As a result, the book is an excellent grounding to word of mouth marketing and how it can be applied to your business. Recommended.

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The Starbucks Experience by Joseph Michelli isn’t, as you might expect, a biography of Starbucks. Instead, the book details five principles for “turning ordinary into extraordinary”, with the principles being taken from the structures and systems Starbucks have used throughout their relatively short history.

The second principle, “Everything Matters”, is one that I see missing from many companies and organisations – that details go a long way to forming perceptions. That’s true of both parts of a business: that which customers interact with, and that which goes on behind the scenes. Starbucks apparently use checklists throughout the stores to help workers keep track of the details. Apparently, the brewed coffees Starbucks serve would be good for five hours, but they are rebrewed every hour, on the hour to ensure that the coffee is fresh and hot. Although it may seem hard to believe (especially if you’re not a coffee drinker), the book relates a story that a customer noticed the difference when the rebrewing occurred after one hour and ten minutes – which is why you need to pay attention to details.

Some of the stories that are told in the book didn’t quite ring true for me, but I suspect that’s mostly because the experience of a Starbucks in the US and in the UK are quite different, in terms of customer service (the drinks and environments are pretty much identical). It’s just hard to imagine some of the stories happening here in the UK, especially all the stories that involve free drinks! I think that fact, combined with the slightly fawning attitude towards Starbucks, perhaps explains why the book didn’t really inspire me as other books of this sort have. That said, however, it was still an interesting read which triggered one or two ideas for my own work.

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Authored by J.D. Frazer, the creator of User Friendly, Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free is a great overview on how to actually make money from your website. It’s full of useful advice and insights from Frazer’s work on User Friendly. Although I’d imagine a fair few of you will have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to generate revenue, Frazer points out the things to watch out for too. Recommended.

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Mavericks at Work by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre, both formerly of Fast Company magazine, is a look at a wide range of companies who are turning their industries on their heads by doing business differently than those that went before them. I have to say that I’m a sucker for this kind of book: lots of stories about companies large and small who you may or may not have heard of (HBO, Pixar, Cranium, DPR Construction), examining what they’ve achieved and how they’ve gone about it.

The book is split into four parts: Rethinking Competition, Reinventing Innovation, Reconnecting With Customers and Redesigning Work. Each section covers its topic with relish, relaying stories such as how HBO decided to “jump off [the] cliff” of providing different and better television that was worth paying for, leading it to earn profits of some $1.1 billion in 2004 at a time when everyone else was working to humiliate people in more and more bizarre ways in order to win advertisers.

One of my favourite stories is that of Rob McEwan of Goldcorp a mining company sitting on a 55,000 acre site in Ontario containing gold – somewhere. After six years of struggling to identify exactly where and how much gold lay in the ground, McEwan attended a conference at MIT where he leared about Linux and the open-source movement. This gave him the idea to launch the “Goldcorp Challenge” – very similar to the recent Netflix Prize – where teams from around the world downloaded Goldcorp’s data and submitted their own drilling plans. The contest was a huge success, with entries coming from many fields outwith mining, confirming Goldcorp’s own suspicions about places to drill while also identifying new places to drill. Goldcorp has since expanded its site to over 100,000 acres, and now has reserves of more than 6.6 million ounces of gold.

I could go on, but then you wouldn’t get the enjoyment of reading the book! It’s definitely a page-turner – I think I read it in a couple of hours – and it’s certainly a book that provides a lot of energy on reading it. For that reason, this is one that I’ll be coming back to time and again.

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Succeed On Your Own Terms by Herb Greenberg and Patrick Sweeney has a similar theme to Success Built to Last: that of finding your own definition of success, in order to live a fulfilling life. It does this via a somewhat similar approach, combining in-depth interviews with individuals across the world with comprehensive personality assessments. Greenberg founded Caliper 40 years ago to work with companies large and small in carrying out personality assessments on job candidates and employees, working to match people to the jobs they are best suited for, meaning they also have a wealth of background and experience to call upon.

The book contains a number of interesting, inspiring and motivational stories from a cross-section of the arts, sports, business, politics and “ordinary” people – though there’s nothing particularly ordinary about any of them. During the interviews and assessments, and also along with the authors’ work at Caliper, they identify 19 defining qualities that can help drive success. These include aspects such as optimism, resilience, perseverance and courage. Although those may seem obvious, there is no attempt to claim that all the people mentioned in the book have these traits in equal measure – every one has a different mix.

One other feature each person was found to have in common was that of a “defining moment” – certain times in life when everything changes. There are two categories of defining moment: those that happen, such as a terrible accident, and those that are created, such as starting a company out of frustration with an employer. The problem with some defining moments is that they are hard to identify at the moment they are happening, and so become missed opportunities. Greenberg and Sweeney suggest that it comes down to attitude – paying attention and knowing when to act.

The book concludes with a chapter of 35 questions to ask of yourself, such as “A year from now, how will you know if you are succeeding in your current job?” and “How often do you find yourself going against the tide?” The book also provides a free online assessment from Caliper; the same one completed by most of the participants in the book.

Although Succeed On Your Own Terms and Success Built to Last both cover similar territory, I found that they were complementary enough that I can still recommend reading both if the topic interests you.

Tags: bookreview, books, personaldevelopment

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Success Built to Last by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery and Mark Thompson is a follow-on of sorts to Built to Last by Porras and Jim Collins. Whereas the latter title focused on long-term successful companies, this book is about long-term successful individuals: how they live their lives, their values, and most importantly, what they all have in common.

The background research was conducted over a period of around 10 years, and involved interviews around the world with people from all walks of life. Importantly, however, these are people who have been continually successful over the course of at least 20 years – the book doesn’t include anyone who has been on The Apprentice, for example! Some of the people interviewed for the book include Maya Angelou, Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, Yo-Yo Ma and Nelson Mandela.

The primary thing they share in common is that they all have a definition of success, and what that means to them. In fact, the authors call for the dictionary definition of the word “success” – “impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth, or power”- to be altered to reflect that for the people surveyed, success was generally about personal fulfilment and making a difference to the world they lived in. Fame, wealth and power came after the fact, if at all.

The book details three key elements which each interviewee had in alignment: meaning, “ThoughtStyle”, and “ActionStyle”. Meaning is dependent on the individual of course, “ThoughtStyle” is a sense of accountability and reasoned optimism, while “ActionStyle” is about taking effective actions in line with the other two elements. It doesn’t sound terribly complicated, and it isn’t really. However, few people have these three aspects working in alignment, so it’s fascinating to see how successful individuals brought everything together to achieve their success.

I found the book to be very thought provoking as well as inspiring, and I can thoroughly recommend it – even if you already know what you are doing with your life!

Tags: bookreview, books, personaldevelopment

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LL Bean: The Making of an American Icon is the story of how a small catalogue company from Maine grew far beyond what anyone thought such a business capable of, and became one of the most successful companies and iconic brands in the US. LL Bean was founded in 1920, and has always focused on outdoor equipment – the clothing and kit that is required for hunting, fishing and camping. The book is told from the point of view of Gorman, LL Bean’s grandson and CEO of the company from 1967 until his retiral in 2001.

In the latter days of LL Bean (the person), he was seemingly uninterested in growing the company much beyond where it stodd, and Gorman turns out to be more of an entrepreneur than his grandfather in this regard. When Gorman took over in 1967, the company had revenue of $4.5 million. The year he retired, the company’s revenue had hit $1.2 billion, despite predictions from “experts” that a catalogue company could not turnover more than around $50 million per year.

There is one strong theme running through the book, which is that Gorman understood exactly what the company stood for, just as his grandfather had before him. Unlike competitors Abercrombie & Fitch and Eddie Bauer, there was no inclination to become a “casual” outfitter – LL Bean stood for quality and useful outdoor wear. Gorman is convinced that being aware of that purpose was central to the continued success and growth of the company from catalogues, to retail stores and e-commerce.

The book is written in a similar style to that of Made In America, Sam Walton’s biography and book about Wal*Mart, where the main narrative is broken up by asides from colleagues past and present. Sometimes this works well, but other times it serves to interrupt the flow of the story in progress – a mild annoyance.

From a personal point of view, it was also interesting to learn about a company which I had no real familiarity with. However, I can particularly recommend it if you are interested in what it takes to really grow a company. There are a number of lessons to be taken from this book, which seem applicable to almost any business.

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Little Black Book of Connections by Jeffrey Gitomer is an expansion of a theme contained in his Little Red Book of Selling:

All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. All things being not quite so equal, people STILL want to do business with their friends.

In some ways, this felt like an inverse of Little Red Book of Selling: that was primarily about selling, with some information about networking; Little Black Book of Connections is primarily about networking, with some information about selling. However, I’d argue that both are really about personal growth, and simply approach the same topic from different starting points, taking wildly different routes along the way.

This being a Gitomer book, the book lists 6.5 assets, all geared toward you developing your own “little black book” of names. To do this, the book focuses on teaching how to evaluate the current state of your relationships, and how you can develop them. Primarily, you develop your relationships by being helpful to your contacts, and not looking for anything in return. Of course, in order to be truly helpful, you need to do your homework and learn about your contacts, whether your relationship with that person goes way back or is still to be forged.

Of course, making the connection is one thing, but maintaining it is another. The book offers some tips on staying touch with contacts, and advocates ensuring that you are always able to provide some reason or value for the other person to stay in contact with you. Memorability is also deemed to be important, whether that’s through your role or something more mundane like an unusual business card.

Although all of this is common sense, it is still a fun book to read because of Gitomer’s style and the illustrations scattered throughout, and you never know what ideas reading something you already think you understand well will generate. As is always the case with Gitomer’s books, there is lots more information available through his website using the various codes contained in the book. In fact, there are so many of these that I haven’t even started going through them yet!

If you could only buy one of Gitomer’s books, I’d recommend Little Red Book of Selling over this, but that’s not to say you won’t get anything from this one.

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A Sideways Look At Time by Jay Griffiths: Ugh. This is the first book in a long, long time that I couldn’t even bring myself to finish reading. I hated the writing style, and I couldn’t decide if the book simply didn’t have a point, or if it only had one point made over and over again.

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Disneywar by James B. Stewart centres around Michael Eisner’s term as CEO (and latterly President and Chairman) of the company, and his relationships with other employees along with the board. Roy E. Disney (Walt’s nephew) had brought him to the company in 1984, but Eisner never seems to have trusted him. I put this down to the fact that Roy had helped remove the previous CEO (Ron Miller, Walt’s son-in-law), so perhaps Eisner never felt entirely secure in his post. Over the years, Eisner replaced the majority of the board members with people who were in some way beholden to him. After Frank Wells, the President & COO brought in at the same time as Eisner, died in 1994, Eisner concentrated his hold on the board by taking on the role of President himself. He eventually also added the role of Chairman, ensuring that he could run the company pretty much as he wished, with almost no dissent from his board.

The first 10 or so years of his reign were undeniably successful, with movies such as Splash, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King being released. However, his increasing paranoia and distrust of almost everyone in the company led to an environment where the company continued to succeed almost in spite of itself. Although large corporations will always have their share of politics and intrigue, Eisner created a culture where he had spies against all the key officers of the company. The book goes on to list a number of these people who now hold key positions at a variety of other companies. The book also details how Eisner made at least three billion-dollar mistakes during his tenure: the Go.com portal, Disneyland Paris, and the purchase of the Fox Family cable channel.

Eventually, Eisner was able to remove Roy Disney from the board, which triggered the “Save Disney” campaign led by Roy which eventually resulted in Eisner having 40% of Disney shareholders withholding support of him continuing at the company. Even more tellingly, 75% of Disney employees withheld their support via their pension plans. Eisner’s position became untenable, despite his best efforts to ignore the shareholder vote, and he left Disney exactly one year ago today (though not before he took credit for the success of Lost and Desperate Housewives, both shows which he evidently hated on seeing the pilots).

I could go on, but suffice to say that the book is an incredibly compelling read, and is a case study in how the truth is often far, far stranger than fiction. Although it’s a fairly chunky book, weighing in at 540 pages, at no point did I think that it was too long. If anything, I’d like to have seen it continued!

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Animal Farm by George Orwell: Wow. I’m glad I finally got around to reading this. An incredibly short book, but also an incredibly powerful story about how power corrupts and how power can be taken from the masses if they’re not paying attention. I’d have to say it’s pretty much perfect.

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Ironically for a book about productivity (or perhaps obviously), this is a review I’ve been procrastinating over for a few weeks – hopefully getting this one written will get me kick-started to catch up on all my reviews!

Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy contains 21 techniques for taking care of the big, large, ugly frogs (tasks) in your life. The theme of most of the techniques is, of course, exactly the same way you’d eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

Many of the techniques will seem familiar to you if you’ve read any other productivity material, but there were a couple of particular points that although obvious, I really need to work better at:

• Preparation: essentially, having everything that you need for the particular task you are going to tackle to hand, having a clean work area clear of any possible distractions, and a comfortable chair. I’m particularly bad for not keeping my work areas clear!
• Sense of Urgency: I’m sure everyone is familiar with the experience of working faster when a deadline is looming. Tracy contends that developing this sense of urgency without having the looming deadline is a hallmark of effective and successful people. I suppose another way to look at this is that you get the bad stuff over with quicker.

Tracy doesn’t try to introduce an overall system in the way of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Instead, this is similar in style to Ready For Anything – a series of tips and techniques to help you clear that to-do list.

As with other books in this vein, Tracy’s style of writing is very easy to take in and process, and the tone is as encouraging as you might expect, with just the occasional warning of of “what if you don’t do this?” However, I felt that many of the techniques merely repeated what went before, so the book loses points for that. I’d recommend Ready For Anything over this book.

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Defining the Wind – one of those books that some people consider me a bit strange for wanting to read – sets out to tell the story of how Sir Francis Beaufort came to create his eponymous scale of wind strength. Instead, we embark upon the twin voyages of Beaufort’s life story and the mazy route to understanding the wind.

The story begins with author Scott Huler relating how he fell for the scale in the first place – reading it in the dictionary, where he felt sure he was reading poetry. When he looked again, he realised he was. Phrases such as “small trees in leaf begin to sway” are iambic. His obsession to find out more about the scale came was triggered years later, when Hurricane Fran hit his home town in 1996.

Far from being a straightforward investigation, Huler’s efforts see him travel to the UK and Uruguay, become part of the crew on on a Bark and, to his surprise, become more interested in Beaufort himself as much as the story of the wind scale. Along the way, we come across some notable names who were also involved in the development of the scale, such as Tycho Brahe and Anders Celsius. We discover how Beaufort didn’t really create the scale, but actually he did. To Huler’s obvious disappointment, it also transpires that Beaufort did not pen the descriptive words used in the scale he originally fell for. However, after some investigative work, he does turn up the man responsible – a postmaster from North Shields in the north of England. In fact, those descriptors change with the times, to reflect the environment people are most familiar with. For example, modern-day descriptors might say that “moving cars veer” in high winds, whereas the text from 1906 of course has no mention of cars.

As much as we learn about the creation, adoption and adaptation of Beaufort’s scale, we also learn about the man himself. “The last eighteenth century man” Huler calls him, due to his compulsive interest and observations about anything and everything around him. His many notebooks contained maps, sketches and clippings on how to capture bees, as well as his daily recording of the weather around him using the scale and weather shorthand which he had helped create and popularise.

Huler’s enthusiasm for the subjects at hand is obvious, which makes what could otherwise be a rather dry subject a thoroughly interesting read. He even creates his own scale variant: of outdoor cigarette lightability, which he hopes no one will ever use.

He closes the book by imparting the effect that his exploration of Beaufort’s life has had his own: pay attention, observe the world around you and take notes – you never know what may come of it. Which is exactly why I read books such as this.

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Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling is ostensibly about being a better salesperson, and it certainly contains many useful tips in that regard. However, this is just as much a book about being a better person. In the tradition of classics such as Napoleon Hill’s Think & Grow Rich, all of the advice given here is applicable to life in general.

The book is subtitled “12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness” – it seems that Gitomer’s trick for driving points home is to have the last on a list be the “half”. Usually, these are the points with the greatest insight or with the potential to have the greatest impact.

Certainly the order of the main 12.5 principles seems to reinforce this, with the final point being to “resign your position as general manager of the universe” – essentially, stop worrying so much about other people’s problems that you can’t have any real impact on anyway, and start worrying more about your own. As ever with these types of books, it is all common-sense advice that seems obvious when you read it but somehow it still needs to be pointed out repeatedly. Indeed, Gitomer makes reference to this fact in his introduction when he writes “this is not a book to be read, this is a book to be studied.”

Throughout, Gitomer is passionate and articulate, doing an excellent job of getting his point across in a forceful yet effective manner. Some may find his style overly abrasive, however.

Like many books of this sort, you will found yourself feeling motivated and inspired while reading it. The real trick is to keep this feeling going. To this end, Gitomer relates the story of how he read Think & Grow Rich one chapter a day, repeatedly. This allowed him to read the book 15 times in one year, and he recommends reading his book at least two or three times in succession in order to fully appreciate the points and tactics he makes. It’s definitely a practical book rather than one to keep on the bookshelf, and a book you’ll be referring to on many occasions after the initial reading.

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Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: Given that this novel deals with the stupidity of mankind, it’s no great surprise that I found myself thinking “good point” on a few occasions. I’m not quite sure if I’m supposed to feel depressed after reading it. For the most part, it was quite bleak, but I can’t say I feel any worse than I did beforehand.

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A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno: Although the diary is for the year of 1995, there is plenty in here to keep you interested. The “swollen appendices” of the title are actually a whole set of essays, letters and so on to complement the main diary. Eno is a very interesting character, and quite obviously a smart cookie. Very enjoyable.

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Juicing the Orange by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn is another book about creativity, and another book by an advertising company. This advertising company actually seem interested in helping their clients make money via creativity, however, and this book describes the approach they take. The authors are co-founders of Fallon Worldwide, who have worked for Citi, Holiday Inn Express and BMW, amongst others.

Early on, Fallon came up with the concept of what they refer to as creative leverage: using creativity to measurably affect their client’s businesses. The company have come up with seven guiding principles, which are presented in the book, to help you try this approach out for yourself.

The authors admit, however, that there is no step-by-step, one-size-fits-all recipe, for this. Instead, insights are provided by real-life examples. This learning by anecdote works fairly well, since they cover the missteps in the creation of campaigns as well as well as the successes. Even better is the fact that a couple of examples detail campaigns which were unsuccessful, along with analysis of the likely mistakes which were made.

I’m not really sure I picked up anything new from the book, as the material seemed familiar to me, overlapping with books such as Marketing Outrageously and The End Of Marketing As We Know It. Having said that, reinforcement of an idea when done well can be just as useful and effective, and if you haven’t read either of those books, it will be new to you.

The book was very easy to read (a couple of hours at the most), and contains some great stories behind some famous ad campaigns. To some, the book may feel a little lightweight, but really the book is about encouraging you to think analytically and critically – and that’s where creativity will stem from.

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First published in 1957, Be My Guest is the autobiography of Conrad Hilton, the founder of the Hilton Hotel group. In it, he tells the story of his life as one of the world’s greatest hoteliers. Starting in New Mexico during the 1890s, where his father was a successful entrepreneur, Hilton learned from a young age how to run a business successfully. After an ill-fated attempt to become a theatre impresario, Hilton was elected to the state legislature in New Mexico when it was officially accepted into the United States. Following that, he then found success with a bank in his hometown. Later, he moved to Texas, the state of opportunity thanks to its new-found oil reserves. He literally stumbled into the hotel business, when the owner of The Mobley hotel in Cisco in became so fed up with having to turn people away that he agreed to sell the hotel to Hilton for a surprisingly knock-down price.

Of course, Hilton can’t believe his luck at winning such a good deal, and after he continues and improves upon the success of the first hotel, begins to believe that perhaps this is his business. He embarks on a journey of buying and selling hotels, eventually ending up the owner of what he calls “the greatest of them all” – The Waldorf in New York.

The book also covers details of his personal life, such as his ill-fated marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor, and the troubles he had raising his two sons while simultaneously trying to run one of the biggest hotel companies in the world after the break-up of his first marriage.

I was struck by the similarity of some of Hilton’s business practices with that of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, primarily that of making sure the managers of the hotels had a direct ownership stake in the hotel they managed in the days prior to the company being listed on the stock market. This was of course designed to ensure commitment and loyalty, and also gave them a proportional share of the profits generated by the hotel.

Hilton ends the book with ten guidelines for achieving success in your life:

• Find your own particular talent
• Be big
• Be honest
• Live with enthusiasm
• Don’t let your possessions possess you
• Don’t worry about your problems
• Don’t cling to the past
• Look up to people when you can — down to no one
• Assume your full share of responsibility for the world in which you live
• Pray consistently and confidently

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Subtitled “The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services”, Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries is a handbook for entrepreneurs who have industry changing inventions. However, even for entrepreneurs who have inventions which are somewhat less than industry changing, there are plenty of useful tips and tricks to be picked up here.

The book is split into three parts, entitled “Create Like a God”, “Command Like a King” and “Work Like a Slave”, each with three chapters. The first part covers the actual invention of revolutionary products. Starting off by detailing a practical thought process for gaining insights to problems, the book then covers shipping a product people can start to use, and how to revise that product to make it even better.

“Command Like a King” covers product adoption, and how to remove the obstacles which stop people actually buying your new product. This part contains my favourite section of the book, the 12 “death magnets”. The term was originally coined by a tank commander, Jim Jones, at the US Army’s National Training Center after he noticed that visiting tank commanders kept heading through areas that where other tanks had been “killed” during the exercise. Kawasaki then applies the term to business, stating that revolutionaries need to avoid the traditional patterns of companies. The number one death magnet is “the best product wins”. Most people know that this is rarely true, and yet many still seem to fall into the trap.

The third part of the book is fairly self-explanatory: get ready to work hard in order to see your product become successful! These chapters cover devouring and sharing information, getting out to meet with your customers and partners face-to-face, and about not asking your customers to do anything that you wouldn’t do.

There is actually a final chapter, called “Don’t Let Bozosity Grind You Down”. The chapter begins with several pages of quotes from experts who got it wrong, the moral being that when people tell you that your product won’t work, you shouldn’t give up, since there’s every chance that you’re right and they’re wrong.

Like all of Kawasaki’s books, it’s a very easy read, but there is a lot of information here. Definitely recommended

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